YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – By his own admission, Sterling Williams is a happy guy – something people ordinarily might not associate with his occupation.
Williams is owner and CEO of Sterling-McCullough Williams Funeral Home, the family-owned business started by his father in 1952.
“I take that as God’s sense of humor that he put me in this profession, knowing that I’m a happy guy,” Williams reflects during an interview at his Warren funeral home, one of his business’s two locations.
Williams was raised in the funeral business founded by his father in Youngstown in the early 1950s, and found a passion for it, he recalls.
“I enjoy working with people, particularly those who need your assistance at their lowest moments in life,” he remarks.
Background
While attending Miami University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1977, he received an offer from Ford Motor Co. to apprentice in its management program.
Uncertain whether he wanted to do that, he instead pursued his master’s degree in business administration at Kent State University, which he earned in 1980. At that point, he decided he wanted to be self-employed rather than someone else’s employee and “be my own boss, own my own business, control my own destiny,” he says. “And my dad had already started the business. It wasn’t like I was starting from scratch.”
Williams describes his father, who died in October 2004, as his hero. He recalls key lessons that he attempted to impart upon him and his brother and sister.
“He was a man of great integrity, and he always used to preach to us that you do things because it’s the right thing to do, not because there’s something else that you can get from it,” he says. “The second thing he taught us is that we’re in this world to make this place a better world than it was when we came into, so he preached that we should contribute back to the community, try to help strengthen it, try to help make it grow, so it’s a better place than it was.”
In addition to his father, he also looked up to the successful examples provided by two Cleveland-area mortuaries: House of Wills and E.F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home, which did 1,300 funerals each year.
Sterling-McCullough Williams does about 120 funerals annually but Williams also owns a funeral home in Cleveland that does 400 funerals annually.
Williams distills his own approach to leadership simply. “You have to do the right thing,” he asserts. “There is no price on doing the right thing.”
The funeral home operator also says he tries to not only educate the people he works with but wants them to see that he is able to perform the same tasks that he is asking them to perform. “There’s no job in my business that I haven’t done,” he says.
As he works with his son, Tyler, in the business, he comes back to emphasizing the importance of passion.
“If you don’t have passion for what you do, after you make so much money then you’re just an unhappy man with money,” he remarks. “So I’m trying to get him to enjoy doing what he does, because if he enjoys doing what he does he doesn’t mind spending the time.”
The Industry
People in the mortuary business need to have “a love for people” and should be sympathetic, he says. Additionally, anyone running a funeral home needs to understand marketing and finance, as well as the operations of the business itself. Profit margins probably are smaller than most people would assume – only 10% to 15%.
Funeral homes require significant capital to operate. They have brick-and-mortar locations, staff and vehicle fleets, he points out.
When operators get in trouble for not performing services that have been paid for, it might not be that the operators were dishonest or greedy, but were undercapitalized. “They were doing what they thought they could do to try to make it work,” he says.
The biggest change in the mortuary business he has seen has been the consolidation of the funeral service with the wake – which used to take place the night before – into a single session. Now, calling hours for families and friends increasingly are taking place an hour before the service.
Additionally, people had more money for funerals previously because they had insurance attached to jobs that moved because of the North American Free Trade Agreement, he says. “People now have to have either personal insurance or pay out of pocket,” he says.
He also is seeing a rise in cremations, which represented 2% of his business when he started and has risen to 25%.
Other Businesses
Over the years, Williams has branched into other fields.
Businesses he has launched over the years include Tax Master Accounting and Tax Service Inc.
When working on his MBA, he recognized that some of the wealthiest people in America didn’t pay taxes. Intrigued by how that happened, he began to take some tax courses and discovered he had a talent for taxes, and started Tax Master.
In addition, he launched Twin Realty and Leasing LLC and Steel Town LLC, which own and lease real estate, primarily in Youngstown. “We do have commercial properties, but the majority is residential,” he says.
In addition to his business interests, Williams serves on boards for several area organizations, including Youngstown State University, Western Reserve Port Authority and Medici Museum of Art.
Williams was named in 2017 to the WRPA board, which since 2009 has played a more active role in local economic development. His motivation for joining the board was to bring jobs to Warren and Youngstown, which he says is “the biggest thing that we can do” to help those cities.
“I noticed a lot of jobs were going out to North Jackson and Lordstown,” but few were coming to the inner-city communities, he recalls. “I just thought that I would be able to have an influence to make sure that we’re concentrating on the cities of Warren and Youngstown.”
Praise by Colleagues
“I don’t think there’s a question that he’s a passionate advocate for the city of Warren and the urban community,” Anthony Trevena, WRPA’s executive director, says. “Whenever there’s a discussion about matters related to the cities, whether it’s Youngstown or especially the city of Warren, he passionately advocates for the opportunity to create jobs and opportunity there.”
Williams brings a lot to the port authority through his personal connections and the people he knows through his business, Marty Loney, WRPA chairman since 2017, says. In addition, being a CPA “helps us on the finance side” by assisting with understanding its finances.
“His background in accounting, as well as his professional business and entrepreneurship background, is very valuable,” Trevena says. ”When we’re talking about any type of business negotiations, he has a lot of input, so I lean on Sterling when it comes to different types of negotiations because of his experience.”
Gov. Mike DeWine named Williams to the YSU Board of Trustees in May 2024. Among the reasons he sought the appointment was his concern about the number of Black students, which is around 5%.
“I’m trying to see if I can improve that percentage,” he says.
One of the challenges to achieving that objective is the Youngstown City School District, which is not “graduating a lot of college-ready students,” he admits. YSU is working with the school system to motivate students at a younger age, including an initiative to motivate them by bringing them to campus and impressing upon them the kinds of things they need to do in order to attend college when they get older.
YSU President Bill Johnson also praises the business experience and financial background that he brings to the board, which is the type of expertise needed to run a university nowadays. In addition, he is “not a passive attendee” at board of trustees meetings.
“Sterling is very engaged,” Johnson says. “When we have our committee meetings in anticipation of the board meetings, he’s done his homework. He asks very salient, and, sometimes, the not-so-obvious tough questions that a good business person would ask.”
Williams says most people would be surprised to learn that he has never experienced a headache. Asked what his daughter, Lauren, who is a medical doctor, makes of that, he offers a wry response.
“She says I’m giving everybody else headaches,” he says.
Pictured at top: Sterling Williams leads the family-owned Sterling-McCullough Williams Funeral Home while also serving on the boards of several regional organizations.
